Love Object incorporates the hoary plot devices of the classic UK creeper Dead of Night, Richard Attenborough’s Magic, and various and sundry episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents in its story of a twentysomething schlemiel and his quest to find the right girl, who, in this case as in those, is not made of flesh and blood. Instead, office drone Kenneth (Harrington), the shyest of the shy boys, orders a “Nikki” off the Internet, making sure that this creepy, life-size plastic lover resembles as closely as possible Lisa (Sagemiller), his unrequited workplace crush. To be fair, Nikki is head and shoulders and bosoms above the usual Inflate-a-Mate found in the back pages of the more tawdry lad rags; eerily pliant (male misogynist metaphor!), coolly receptive to Kenneth’s advances (ditto!), and, eventually, insanely jealous when Kenneth’s real-life relationship to Lisa begins to heat up as a result of his newly acquired confident attitude toward the ladies. (Argh! Stop already!) Nikki begins calling Kenneth at work and eventually heads into full-on maniac mode. Then again, it could be that Kenneth is just suffering total mental collapse – with a howling Rip Torn as your boss, you just might, too. Parigi’s film has huge fistfuls of possibility, but he squanders what could have been an interesting storyline about the pitfalls of expectation, romance, and 21st-century dating rituals on obvious, less-than-thrilling twists that by the end leave Love Object little more than a blood-splattered Bride of the Monster. There are some things to appreciate here, chief among them Harrington’s performance as the schmo from hell, and cinematographer Sidney Sidell’s way with fluorescent lighting (we’ve seen few films that have captured the will-sapping anti-ambience of an ill-lit office space better than this one), but in the end, even genre stalwart Udo Kier (Blade) ends up being wasted in a bit role as Kenneth’s prying landlord. Parigi’s characters are such genuinely off-putting people that by the time the red starts flying in act three, it’s all you can do not to cheer the carnage. Perhaps that was the director’s point, but, like Kenneth’s heart and soul, Love Object feels so depressingly vacant that it registers less as a film than as a pointed lesson in what not to do in the wacky world of non-traditional dating. Hasn’t anyone in this film heard of Friendster?
This article appears in May 7 • 2004.